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What seems to be the problem? Long-established procedures for doing backups
often result in having to maintain a large number of physical tapes. Nowadays,
backup tapes serve not only to restore application data (their traditional purpose),
but also serve as a target for e-discovery purposes (as part of the emerging
trend toward litigation support). Eliminating tapes where possible not only
saves costs and reduces tape administration complexity, but also makes the e-discovery
process easier. But eliminating tapes may not be easy.
What you need to know: With the advent of disk as a front-end for the backup-restore
process, tapes are taking a more complementary role. You may be able to rethink
your tape backup process and reduce the number of generations of tape required.
You might long for the days when tape was primarily for backup/restore purposes
(albeit also for deep archiving), but that is no longer the case. Your tapes
now represent what is called a "dormant liability." Your company is
liable for what is on the tapes. But there may be a lack of knowledge about
what is actually on the tapes yet the worry about deleting information improperly
may lead to a keep-everything strategy. What this does is increase liability
risk as now all the data is subject to potential litigation.
You don't want to get caught with more data than you need, but you need to
be careful that you don't delete data that you should not delete.
Now there are companies that you can turn to for help. For example, Index
Engines can help with e-discovery from tape and RenewData
has a backup tape elimination service (although it is typically for organizations
that have 10,000 or more tapes). (Both Index
Engines and RenewData have briefed me as an industry analyst.)
Basically, you need a process to identify content that matches potential litigation
hold criteria. Tapes that have content that matches the hold criteria can be
isolated. You can then do a consolidation process using data de-duplication
to get rid of extra copies of the same material. Finally, you can delete content
with irrelevant data.
What you can do about it: Seeing what needs to be done is a lot easier than
actually doing it. Performing a number of tapes including a physical media audit,
a tape content analysis, file level de-duplication, and overall backup tape
elimination may be a formidable process especially if you have a large number
or tapes. One choice is to look for professional service help. The other choice
is to do it yourself. If you do, you may want to do a lot of planning first.
Perhaps you can change procedures to keep fewer tapes in the long run. Then
when older generation tapes begin to be recycled, you get a natural deletion
of data and still follow legal procedures. The whole process may not be easy,
but you do not have the option of doing nothing.
